Comments

Unreal Tournament 2003. At my first LAN party with Cannonfodder, a DIFFERENT guy named 'jimmah!', and two other people I hadn't met - these guys pretty much made high school bearable for me. I was a high school freshman. We played a metric ton of Bombing Run in the Icefields, then switched to the original Ghost Recon. GR co-op multiplayer? Tons of fun.

Up until then, I had only played single player (usually RTS or RPG) games, and flight sims. I was huge into flight sims.

The first game I controlled with the mouse in one hand, and the keyboard in the other was Descent, but I was using the numpad at the time, rather than WASD. I think the first WASD for me was Duke 3D. I remember that I had remapped the controls to be more like Doom, and I was very resistant to change. I still di poorly with it, until I found the Zboard with the special butterfly, and now I refuse to play WASD games without a Zboard.

First time I used WASD, for sure, was during beta 1.2 (the AK-47 release) of Counter-Strike. I may have used it in Quake2 earlier that summer, but I can't remember for sure. I also may have used it in Descent (props to Prime for reminding me of that game) on my Dell P90.

I played with arrow keys all the way up until TF2's launch. I didn't start using WASD until a good year into the game's release. I only changed because moving the keyboard was too annoying. (once you get start setting beers to the side of the keyboard while you play, you can see why this became an issue :P)

Seriously though, I was never at a disadvantage playing on arrow keys. People say that arrow keys limit your area to bind keys - not an issue for me. Because of my XBOX HUEG hands, I was extremely effective because of my reach.

Best example - while playing FEAR multiplayer, I was crouched and leaning right around a barrier and got a sweet kill I wanted to get a screenshot of it. The tricky part were my binds:

All three of those keys at once, or else I was a dead man. I was successful, though it did actually put me in pain. This was, and still is, the largest stretch I have ever pulled off on the keyboard. Go ahead and try to hit all three. Tell me how bad that hurts.

I played with arrow keys all the way up until TF2's launch. I didn't start using WASD until a good year into the game's release. I only changed because moving the keyboard was too annoying. (once you get start setting beers to the side of the keyboard while you play, you can see why this became an issue :P)

Seriously though, I was never at a disadvantage playing on arrow keys. People say that arrow keys limit your area to bind keys - not an issue for me. Because of my XBOX HUEG hands, I was extremely effective because of my reach.

Best example - while playing FEAR multiplayer, I was crouched and leaning right around a barrier and got a sweet kill I wanted to get a screenshot of it. The tricky part were my binds:

All three of those keys at once, or else I was a dead man. I was successful, though it did actually put me in pain. This was, and still is, the largest stretch I have ever pulled off on the keyboard. Go ahead and try to hit all three. Tell me how bad that hurts.

Sure sure, but that's still keyboard in one hand, mouse in the other. It's impossible to control any 3D FPS games the way we did before the mouse became part of the scheme.

Wolfenstien was arrow keys for moving and looking, ctrl for shooting, number keys for changing weapons, and that was all the controls you got.

By the time we were playing quake, anyone who hadn't at least made the transition to mouse-look was at a serious disadvantage.

As a side note: what I think is most interesting about the FPS controls, is how you can sometimes tell what FPS a person started on, by looking at how they remap their controls. Whatever the first game was that they played extensively, they likely continue to remap the controls to match that game's default scheme years later.

When I start up an FPS for the first time, the first thing I do is go into the options, and remap all the controls.

As a side note: what I think is most interesting about the FPS controls, is how you can sometimes tell what FPS a person started on, by looking at how they remap their controls. Whatever the first game was that they played extensively, they likely continue to remap the controls to match that game's default scheme years later.

I've noticed that around Quake2/Half-Life came out, default controls seemed to become more standardized and have been locked into the same scheme since.